Reopening of Schools in the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Quality of Life of Teachers While Coping with This New Challenge in the North of Spain

The impact of teachers' perceived competence in information and communication technology usage, and workplace anxiety on well-being, as mediated by emotional exhaustion

Introduction

The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015, emphasizing the importance of achieving peace, prosperity, and well-being for all people. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, sustainable health has become an important issue. Teachers were forced to adopt distance teaching, necessitating rapid upgrading of their ICT skills and integration into e-learning, which caused tangible and intangible pressures on teachers and impacted their well-being. This study examined the effects of ICT competence on teachers' workplace anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and well-being during the pandemic from the perspective of Social Cognitive Theory (SCT).

Methods

A quantitative research methodology and a questionnaire survey with a total of 21 questions were used as the primary research design. The snowball method was employed as a sampling method for online questionnaires from September to October 2021. A total of 216 questionnaires were collected, of which four incomplete questionnaires were excluded, leaving 212 valid questionnaires, with a valid questionnaire recovery rate of 98.1%. The valid questionnaires were analyzed using Smart Pls 4.0 Partial Least Square Method Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM).

Results

The study found that teachers' ICT competence could significantly reduce emotional exhaustion and enhance teachers' well-being. However, there was no significant effect on workplace anxiety. Additionally, well-being was not directly affected by workplace anxiety, and teachers' well-being needs to be mediated by emotional exhaustion to be indirectly affected. Emotional exhaustion plays an important mediating role between teachers' ICT competence and workplace stress, both of which are important mediators of well-being.

Discussion

From a practical point of view, to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030, it is ideal to have good health and well-being for the whole person. This study facilitates the development of strategies to improve the well-being of teachers, which provides an empirical basis for the enhancement of mental health and well-being of educators.

Factors That Impact the Relationship between Perceived Organizational Support and Technostress in Teachers

In the last two years, the obligatory use of technologies due to the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the technostress suffered by education professionals. This study investigates the relationships between technostress and perceived organizational support and the influence of certain socio-demographic variables. An online survey was administered to 771 teachers working in different educational stages in various autonomous communities in Spain. Perceived organizational support was found to be significantly correlated with technostress. Women tend to experience more technostress in general and significant gender differences were also found in the dimension of anxiety. The analyzed data also suggest that perceived organizational support is higher in private schools. In urban centers, teachers' technostress increases in higher educational stages, such as secondary education and baccalaureate. Further work is needed to develop school policies that address the needs of teachers and provide support for those at risk of technostress. In addition, there is a need to design coping strategies and prioritize the most at-risk sectors to improve their overall health and well-being.

How much do we care about teacher job insecurity during the pandemic? A bibliometric review

In this study, a descriptive bibliometric analysis of the scientific production in the Web of Science on job insecurity perceived by teachers in pandemic situations was carried out. The result shows the growing interest in the topic with an upward trend with an annual growth of 41.52%. Forty-seven papers from 41 journals with 2,182 cited references were considered, with 149 researchers from 30 countries publishing at least one article. The country with the most publications was the United States, followed by Germany and Spain. The United States was the country with the most collaborations. A total of 95 institutions published papers, and the universities with the most registrations were Miami University and the University of the Basque Country, although York University and the University of the Basque Country had a higher overall citation coefficient (102 and 40, respectively). Of the 41 journals that have published on the topic, Frontiers in Education and the British Journal of Educational Psychology stood out in terms of their article numbers. However, this last one was superior in terms of the overall number of citations per year, followed by Frontiers of Psychology.

Affordances as experienced by university faculties during and after the sudden transition to online teaching

The ravaging effect of COVID-19 has been felt in all spheres of life. While countries are easing their restrictions, the remnants of COVID on education remain, with most universities formally embracing online teaching. Faculty have had to deal with this sudden and enduring transition to online teaching. Although some developments have been made with online education, enormous challenges are simultaneously reported in the literature. This mixed-method study aims to assess the essence of a faculty's bionetwork of lived experience after the sudden shift to online teaching due to the pandemic. Affordance theory was used as a theoretical lens to study the benefits, challenges, and opportunities associated with online education during and post-COVID. The study data comes from faculty members at one institution (n = 170) and follow-up interviews with a smaller subset of participants from the same pool (n = 10). Path analysis and mediation analysis revealed significant differences between the participants based on nationality and gender. While the findings supported two hypotheses, the third hypothesis was not supported. Overall, the findings showed both convergence and divergence between the qualitative and quantitative data. The study incorporates recommendations for online teaching, faculty well-being, and further research based on the results.

Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Classrooms at the University of the Basque Country through a User-Informed Natural Ventilation Demonstrator

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a renewed interest in indoor air quality to limit viral spread. In the case of educational spaces, due to the high concentration of people and the fact that most of the existing buildings do not have any mechanical ventilation system, the different administrations have established natural ventilation protocols to guarantee an air quality that reduces risk of contagion by the SARS-CoV-2 virus after the return to the classrooms. Many of the initial protocols established a ventilation pattern that opted for continuous or intermittent ventilation to varying degrees of intensity. This study, carried out on a university campus in Spain, analyses the performance of natural ventilation activated through the information provided by monitoring and visualisation of real-time data. In order to carry out this analysis, a experiment was set up where a preliminary study of ventilation without providing information to the users was carried out, which was then compared with the result of providing live feedback to the occupants of two classrooms and an administration office in different periods of 2020, 2021 and 2022. In the administration office, a CO2-concentration-based method was applied retrospectively to assess the risk of airborne infection. This experience has served as a basis to establish a route for user-informed improvement of air quality in educational spaces in general through low-cost systems that allow a rational use of natural ventilation while helping maintain an adequate compromise between IAQ, comfort and energy consumption, without having to resort to mechanical ventilation systems.

Back to School: Italian Teachers' Perceptions of the Impact of COVID-19 on Personal and Social Well-Being and Teaching Methods

During the COVID-19 pandemic, continuous closing and reopening of schools may have had an impact on teachers' perception of the risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 and of the effectiveness of health measures introduced to limit the spread of the virus, with consequences on teaching methods and relational bonds within schools. By means of an online survey, we measured: teachers' stress, job-satisfaction, self-efficacy and emotions at work, risk-perception of contracting SARS-CoV-2, perception of effectiveness of health measures, teaching methods and social relationships. Participants were 2446 teachers (2142 women and 304 men) all engaged in the four educational stages. Most of the respondents were aged 50 or older (45%), followed by a group aged 41-50 (31%) and by a group aged <40 (24%). We used path analysis to test the impact that COVID-19 had, according to teachers, on teaching methods (Model 1) and social relationships (Model 2). In both models, teachers' stress was positively directly associated with risk-perception of contracting SARS-CoV-2 (Model 1: β = 0.10; p < 0.001; Model 2: β = 0.09; p < 0.001). Additionally, we found an indirect path between teachers' stress and risk-perception of contracting SARS-CoV-2 on the one hand, and perception of effectiveness of health measures on the other hand (Model 1: β = 0.02; p < 0.001; Model 2: β = 0.02; p < 0.001). These results suggest that, in emergencies, risk perception level, emotional regulation, and teachers' stress levels were all key factors affecting teaching methods and relationship quality in schools.

The Well-Being of Primary School Teachers during COVID-19

This study examines the self-rated health and well-being of Icelandic teachers just before and over a year after COVID-19 first appeared. We ask, what was the stress level in 2021 compared to 2019 and the impact of mental and physical health and health symptoms on perceived stress? Were there any changes in self-assessed mental and physical health? Were there any changes in self-assessed mental and physical health symptoms? The study is based on an online survey conducted in 2019 and 2021. A total of 920 primary school teachers answered the questionnaire in part or in full, after three reminders. The main findings show increased stress, worsening mental and physical health, and increasing mental and physical symptoms in 2021 compared to 2019. The results also show a higher percentage of women than men reporting high stress, with women scoring higher on the PSS scale, but the gender patterns for mental and physical health are less clear. The results show that the COVID-19 pandemic had negative consequences on the health and well-being of the teachers. The study demonstrates the importance of school authorities keeping an exceptionally watchful eye on the welfare and well-being of teachers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What Levers to Promote Teachers’ Wellbeing during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: Lessons Learned from a 2021 Online Study in Six Countries

To highlight effective levers to promote teachers’ wellbeing worldwide, particularly during difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated work-related factors associated with teacher wellbeing, across borders and cultures. In six countries/territories, we examined the factors that were most consistently and strongly associated with two indicators of wellbeing at work: (i) job satisfaction; and (ii) work/life balance, and three indicators of general wellbeing: (i) subjective health; (ii) mental health; and (iii) life satisfaction. Between May and July 2021, after 18 months of the pandemic, 8000 teachers answered the first edition of the International Barometer of Education Personnel’s Health and Wellbeing (I-BEST): 3646 teachers from France, 2349 from Québec, 1268 from Belgium, 302 from Morocco, 222 from The Gambia, and 215 from Mexico. For each country/territory and each wellbeing indicator, we used a forward stepwise regression procedure to identify important determinants among a carefully selected set of 31 sociodemographic, private, and professional life factors. Aside from healthcare access, the factors most consistently and strongly associated with teacher wellbeing in France, Québec and Belgium (samples whose size were ≥1000) were related to the psychosocial and the organizational dimensions of work, namely: feeling of safety at school, autonomy at work, and the quality of relationships with superiors and quality of relationships with students. In the smaller samples of teachers from the three remaining countries (Morocco, The Gambia and Mexico), exploratory analyses showed that the feeling of safety and autonomy at work were, there too, consistently associated with wellbeing indicators. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the factors most consistently associated with teachers’ wellbeing across countries were related to security and autonomy at work, supporting the importance to consider these aspects in a continuous, structural way at school. Factors associated with teachers’ wellbeing in very different contexts require further cross-cultural study.

Impact of Using Facemasks on Literacy Learning: The Perception of Early Childhood Education Teachers

In this work, quantitative research is carried out on the importance that educators give to literacy work in early childhood education classrooms and the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic and the use of facemasks have had on it. To this end, a survey designed for this purpose has been used, which has been passed on to a set of 112 Spanish early childhood educators. The teachers surveyed occupy different positions in the classroom (tutors, support technicians, specialists in bilingualism, therapeutic pedagogy and speech and hearing), and, in addition, they themselves learned to read from different methods of literacy learning (synthetic or analytical). The results found in this study indicate that educators express intermediate evaluations of the importance of literacy work in the classroom, higher if it is done through digital resources, and higher for the synthetic method than for the analytical method. In addition, the impact of the use of masks on literacy learning was rated as very negative. On the other hand, gaps have been identified in the above perceptions by the position occupied in the classroom and by the method used to learn to read. Finally, some actions are suggested to homogenize the perceptions of the different professionals, and some lines of research are proposed.

Sustainable Program Assessment Practices: A Review of the ABET and NCAAA Computer Information Systems Accreditation Process

Program outcome assessment is a complex process that demands careful planning and resources in order to accurately assess higher-order thinking skills. A well-defined assessment approach provides detailed insights into program weaknesses and leads to continuous improvement. Whereas a poor assessment approach does not reflect the underlying weaknesses and may result in a useless effort. Furthermore, each accreditation body may have a different recommended outcome measurement approach. As a result, academic institutions may make adhoc choices just to satisfy accreditation requirements rather than designing a sustainable measurement approach. On the other hand, the magnitude of huge tasks for satisfying multiple accreditation bodies results in fatigue and mental stress for academic staff. ABET is a well-known international program accreditation body, and NCAAA is a local accreditation body for academic programs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In this paper, we have documented that how a sustainable outcome measurement mechanism can be designed to satisfy both ABET and NCAAA requirements. The core contribution of this paper is relevant specifically for academic programs in the Kingdom striving to meet both ABET and NCAAA requirements and is also relevant for all education programs to design an appropriate program assessment approach to ensure a sustainable process to foster better learning among students.

Analysis of Fear Post COVID in First-Year Students after the Incorporation to the Classroom: Descriptive Study in University Students of Health Sciences

BACKGROUND

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social restriction measures were implemented, among them, the adaptation of university teaching to online modality until the end of the 2019-2020 school year in order to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. At the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, the Spanish universities opted for face-to-face teaching. To that end, different special measures and adaptations were implemented in higher education facilities, aimed at minimizing the risk of infection and ensuring safe face-to-face learning. The objective was to explore and describe the level of fear of first-year students after the start of in-person classes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

METHODS

The sample was 185 first-year students who were evaluated on the first day of class. For that purpose, an ad-hoc questionnaire was administered to collect demographic information and to find the level of fear and concern. The Fear of COVID-19 Scale was used to assess the severity of the participants' fear of the pandemic situation.

RESULTS

The results indicate that participating university population does not report fear of the virus, but they describe various psychosomatic characteristics, such as increased pulse rate and heart palpitations (p = 0.008) and insomnia (p = 0.05) when they think about infection with coronavirus. Nevertheless, when data are disaggregated by gender, we observe differences specifically in women (83.2%), such as fear (p = 0.006) and sweaty hands when they think of the virus (p = 0.023).

CONCLUSIONS

Incoming university freshmen do not express concern or fear of potential infection with COVID-19, but they are concerned about family transmission after beginning face-to-face classes.

Consequences of COVID-19 Confinement for Teachers: Family-Work Interactions, Technostress, and Perceived Organizational Support

The confinement experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a rethink of the teaching–learning process to which teachers have responded without planning and instead used their resources. This study aimed to analyze the relationships between work–family interactions, technostress, and perceived organizational support in teachers during the confinement period in Spain that began in March 2020. An online survey was administered to 640 pre-school, primary, and secondary school teachers. Positive reciprocal work–family interactions and their relationship with organizational support were found, with differences according to gender, with women showing a more negative perception of the impact on the family. There were no marked levels of technostress in the overall sample, although higher levels of perceived ineffectiveness and skepticism were found in teachers aged 46 years or older. Teachers in private and subsidized schools showed a higher level of perceived support than those in public schools. There is a need to continue this work to verify the values of these dimensions in other contexts and to apply institutional measures and public policies to improve these indicators in this group.